Smart Growth Around America

There’s some exciting news out of Washington, DC to report this morning, where US EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced in Senate testimony this morning that EPA is joining with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Transportation (USDOT) in a special partnership to work together to promote smart growth and more livable, sustainable communities across America.

Mainstream America is slowly starting to think more and more about how to save energy, save money, and reduce their emissions and carbon footprint. You can’t go far without seeing different media outlets running the story or the segment on the top ten things “you can do” to go green. Often, they leave out one [...]

Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging.org picked up on Growing Cooler in a fantastic recent essay on climate change called “My Other Car is a Bright Green City.”
Sprawled-out land uses generate enormous amounts of automotive greenhouse gases. A recent major study, Growing Cooler, makes the point clearly: if 60 percent of new developments were even modestly [...]

After nearly two years of study and debate, the Congressionally mandated, bipartisan commission charged with predicting our nation’s transportation future emerged last week with it’s collective hair on fire, screaming that our driver-less SUV of a federal policy is headed for a cliff. To which the news media responded with a collective yawn, except for [...]

First of all, happy new year and welcome back! All of us here at SGA are excited about the prospects for 2008, including the transition to a new President and CEO, which you can read here in case you missed it. We’ll be posting Geoff Anderson’s full bio shortly, with perhaps a short Q&A on [...]

The Energy and Climate page explores the connection between energy independence, climate change, and how it all relates to smart growth.

You can download the new fact sheet on “The Link to Energy Security and Climate Change” on that page as well.

Want to learn more about energy, climate change, and sustainability? We’ve got a couple of [...]

Even for people who meet their daily needs by walking, biking or taking transit, sometimes you just need a car. A few years ago, if you didn’t own a car but needed one to use for an hour or a day, your options might have consisted of borrowing a friend’s wheels, or spending 20 minutes [...]

Joel Kotkin teamed up with Ali Modarres last Sunday to pen a piece for the Washington Post entitled “Hot World? Blame Cities, ” in which they ignore most of the scientific evidence about lower per capita carbon emissions of city residents, placing the blame for global warming largely on the shoulders of city-dwellers, and proposing [...]

“This 2007 drought is telling us we can keep on wasting, or we can keep on growing, but we can’t do both.”
— Sally Bethea, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper
Think of it as Hurricane Katrina in slow motion. As you may have heard, the Southeast is withering under a drought unlike any other for at least 100 years. Blame [...]

The growing demand for conveniently located housing in walkable, accessible, compact neighborhoods with a mix of uses has been well-documented, but according to research released today, meeting that demand could significantly reduce the growth in the number of miles Americans drive, shrinking the nation’s carbon footprint while giving people more housing choices.
A new book, pre-released [...]

n introducing his bold, comprehensive plan for a sustainable New York on Earth Day, Mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed to research showing that New Yorkers already had the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the nation. While most news outlets focused on the controversial idea of congestion pricing for Manhattan below 86th Street, they missed the larger point: Well-planned urbanism is likely to be our best hope for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting oil dependency…